The eighth-night moon on her brow

The eighth lunar day is not chosen at random. On the aṣṭamī of the bright fortnight the moon shows exactly half its disc, so the figure is not the thin crescent that Śiva wears in his hair but a full broad arc — the shape of a forehead seen straight on. It is worth holding both moons in view. Śiva carries a fragment of the moon; here she does not wear one, she is the arc. The meditation verse had already called her tārānāyakaśekharā, crowned with the lord of the stars, so within a few lines the moon has been placed on her head, then identified with her brow, then with her whole face. The stotra is not repeating itself. It is tightening.

The second name contains a pun that is easy to walk past. Mṛganābhi, the word used here for musk, means literally "deer's navel", from the gland of the male musk deer from which the substance is taken. And one of the ordinary Sanskrit names of the moon is mṛgāṅka, "deer-marked", because the dark patches on the lunar surface were seen as a deer, just as they were seen elsewhere as a hare — hence the moon's other name, śaśāṅka. So the spot that the poet paints on her moon-face in order to imitate the moon's own spot is itself named after the animal that the moon's spot is traditionally taken to be. The image closes on itself. This is the kind of buried figure that Sanskrit poetics treats as the mark of a real poet, and it is a reason to take the Vāgdevatās' hymn seriously as literature and not only as liturgy.

Viśeṣaka is the technical word for a mark made on the forehead with sandal paste or a similar substance — the dictionary gives exactly that — so what is being described is a cosmetic tilaka of musk, not a natural mole. The detail is not new to the text. The fourth meditation verse, which comes from a completely different source, describes her as alikacumbikastūrikā, with musk kissing her forehead, using a different word for musk and a different word for forehead. Two independent formulations of the same observed image, sitting a few lines apart on the same page, is good evidence that both belong to a settled visual tradition rather than to one poet's invention.

One last word repays a look. Kalaṅka, the moon's spot, also means defamation, blame, a stain on a reputation. The commentators enjoy this. The only blemish anywhere near her is one that she has applied herself, deliberately, and that improves the face it is on.

Two more sixteen-syllable names, one per line, and both of them front-loaded with hard consonants. Aṣṭamī opens with ṣṭ, the retroflex sibilant running straight into the retroflex stop: the tongue-tip curls back for the ṣ and stays there for the ṭ, with no forward movement in between. This is the same cluster as in aṣṭa, eight, and in every word built on it, so it is worth twenty seconds of drilling.

The join between vibhrājat and alika shows the same sandhi you met in cidagni: a final unvoiced t before a vowel becomes a voiced d, giving vibhrājadalika, written विभ्राजदलिक. Seeing that lets you find the word-boundary the ear cannot hear, and it tells you that vibhrājat is another of this stotra's present participles in -at.

Sthala needs care. The th is an aspirated dental — t with a puff of breath — and never the English sound in "thing". Say s, then t, then release the breath: s-tʰa-la.

Mṛga contains a genuine syllabic vowel, ṛ. It is not the sequence "ri", though most northern reciters approximate it that way, nor "ru", though many southern reciters do. The grammarians describe a short r held as the nucleus of the syllable, made with the tongue in the retroflex position. Whichever regional habit you adopt, keep it short: mṛ is one beat, and lengthening it will throw the count of the line.

The ṅk of kalaṅka is the guttural nasal, made at exactly the place where the following k is made, so the tongue does not travel. And viśeṣakā gives you the palatal ś and the retroflex ṣ in adjacent syllables, vi-śe-ṣa-kā, which makes it one of the best two-second drills in the whole first ten verses. If you can hear the difference there, you can hear it anywhere.

As for what this verse asks of the attention: the two verses before it described power and the two after it will describe expression. This one describes a surface at rest. It is the still point of the opening sequence, and the traditional advice about the moon-images in this stotra is simply not to hurry them — a half-moon and a face are both things that reward being looked at longer than seems necessary.